Google is doing the right thing and setting the software Free. Hardware manufacturers are the problem: some of them breach the licensing terms under which Android is distributed...Continue Readingand do not share their source code with their customer. Many more of them lock their devices so that customers cannot update themselves. The economic incentives are obvious: manufacturers will rather sell 950 million new devices and fix the existing 950 million devices for free. We need a rule forcing manufacturers to unlock their bootloaders and to provide the users community with a complete end to end build chain and source code. Then applying the fix becomes trivial. Thank you Google.

If automatic updates are a mandatory part of Windows 10 then we are out from the start. We have too many mission critical applications and legacy hardware components that...Continue Readingdon't always play well with updates. There is NO way we can afford to compromise public safety by turning over control of our computer update services to someone who is not on hand when the update rolls out and crashes systems in the 911 center or responder vehicles.
Our normal process for updates is to apply them to one unit then make sure that it continues to work in real world conditions as expected. After a few days with no problems a wider roll out is initiated. Then after a few more days a complete roll out of non problematic updates. You only have to be burnt once to become very paranoid about updates. We have enough problems with legacy equipment given Windows habit of randomly assigning port numbers to USB slots. So I have to make sure our computers have Serial Com ports.

Good thing, but it is a cure for the symptom not the disease -- and it is limited to a few startups. So not without self-interest, Google?
The real cure is...Continue Readingproper patent reform. While bringing to market new drugs may justify monopolies of 17 or 21 years, tech patents should expire after 18 or 24 months, maximum.